ART REVIEW

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: August 6, 2004

A book called ''A Treatise on Superfluous Things'' was a manual of style for climbers in the courts of the Ming dynasty. It skipped over the basics that everyone knew -- you should be nice to your parents; only emperors wear yellow -- to give tips on fine points of discrimination in luxury items. Jade is among the materials discussed. And at first glance, ''superfluous'' seems just the word for the preposterously exquisite jade objects, from scepters to table screens to paperweights, on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's reinstalled galleries for Chinese decorative arts.

No presentation of such small, marginally functional things can avoid having a Tiffanyesque air. And surely this impression was pronounced in 1902, when the American entrepreneur Heber Reginald Bishop -- who did, indeed, shop for Chinese antiques at Tiffany -- gave his jade collection to the Met with the stipulation that it be housed in a reproduction of the Louis XV-style ballroom of his Manhattan home. The Met complied.

Well, that was then. The present setting for 100 or so of Bishop's Chinese and Indian carvings is all-purpose spare, leaving the objects to send out a charge of luxe on their own, which is not so easy to do. Jade registers slowly on the Western eye. Its surfaces can look glassy or gummy. Its colors are unprecise, difficult to describe: green-gray? yellow-green? grayish-white? It has none of the optical punch of gold: jade absorbs light, doesn't reflect it. It lacks even the glamour of rarity. It is, after all, only semiprecious.

Jade in China is a whole other story. There it is rich with moral and spiritual meaning; it's alive. Luminous and quick to warm to the touch, it must have seemed heaven-sent when first discovered, imbedded in boulders washed down from mountains in Central Asia. Yet because it is unusually hard, direct carving was all but impossible. Slow abrasion was the only way to manipulate it, and this took patience and time.

From these characteristics, an emblematic profile grew. Confucius attributed human virtues to jade, among them integrity, purity and fortitude. The grueling effort required to shape the stone was compared to the discipline needed to train the mind. In predynastic China, jade was reserved for elite burials. In the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 220), it was believed to have vivifying properties. Emperors were buried in suits of jade to insure immortality.

Despite its prestige, the stone went in and out of favor, largely depending on availability. Jade is actually the common name for two minerals. By far the more common is nephrite, found in the Central Asian territory over which China periodically gained and lost political control. The other, slightly harder stone, jadeite, famed for its emerald-green color, was all but unknown in China before the late 18th century.

Although there are jades of great antiquity on view elsewhere at the Met, almost everything in the Bishop installation, which has been organized by Jason Sun, an associate curator in the Asian art department, dates from the 18th century, when the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) brought Chinese jadework to a peak of virtuosity. Odd that the Qing should have been the ones to do so: they were outsiders to Han China, a minority population from the northern forests of Manchuria. When the last Ming emperor hired them as mercenaries, they showed up for work, got rid of the Ming and took the throne. They also assumed a new identity, a kind of hyper-Chineseness, adopting not only the Chinese culture of their day, but also China's past and the art that belonged to it.

The greatest of the Qing art patrons and antiquarians was the Qianlong emperor, who reigned from 1736 to 1795. He was a walking power generator. He made endless inspection tours of the country, worked hard, worshiped intensely and composed tens of thousands of poems. As an art collector, he was a hoarder, a binger, stockpiling among many other things some 30,000 jade objects. Most of the Bishop carvings, including a few in agate, rock crystal, quartz, lapis lazuli and malachite, date from his time. Some are from his own collection.

The pieces range in size from two-inch-high figurines of astrological creatures to a hefty green basin modeled on an even larger one made for Khublai Khan. In style they run from a no-frills, starched-white incense burner with a fluted surface to a couple of all-frills vases with dragons perched on the rim and fruits spilling down the side.

As a practicing Buddhist, the emperor commissioned religious objects; a jade book inscribed with sutras is an example. But most of the Met's objects, from garment hooks to scholar's brushpots, are secular. A few partake of new styles; a rock crystal ball supported by three bronze cranes feels European in essence. But a jade version of an archaic bronze bell is one of many reminders of the fundamental conservatism of Chinese art, how it always circled back to the same few themes and forms, changing in subtle ways with each rotation.